There’s a bad habit in British politics

Dr Jake Scott has a very useful constitutional reminder in CAPX.


Tony Blair’s bad laws have broken Britain

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There’s a bad habit in British politics: rather than fix bad laws, we make worse ones.

This week, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner announced her intention to establish a ‘council on Islamophobia’, that would ‘provide advice to ministers on tackling Islamophobia’. This law is almost a direct product of the 2010 Equality Act, which made the unforgivable mistake of submitting our equal legal standing as British citizens to the legal sanctification of identity.

In turn, as they always do, when these identities clash, rather than re-asserting the legal equality provided for by the historic British constitution, the choice has been made to resolve this bad law with an even worse one. A bad law, it must be remembered, designed to fix the other bad laws of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, the 1976 Race Relations Act and so on.


The whole piece is well worth reading because the UK has spent decades enmeshed in a political culture of new laws and new regulations which benefit nobody but the Blob. Particularly useful is Dr Scott's reference to this as a 'bad habit in British politics'.

It is a bad political habit, easily observed all over the place. "They should ban" culture is just one aspect of it, endless fiddling with petty rules and regulations is another, wanting to be submerged in the EU yet another. It's influence is vast and so destructive that the habit must be broken before we are.